Methods for improving illuminated areas and corresponding illuminating devices are, in principle, known. They are used, e.g., to illuminate operating areas during surgical procedures. Such illuminating devices are often provided with at least two light modules, which make the desired illumination available in the direction of the operating area. The operating area thus overlaps, at least in some areas, the illuminated area of such an illuminating device.
When a user of an illuminating device is moving within the illuminated area in order to work there, he will block part of the light emitted by individual light modules by his body parts, e.g., head, back or arm. This blocking leads to shadowing or to a partial shadowing of the illuminated area, so that the brightness of the illuminated area decreases. This will, in turn, lead to worse visibility conditions, which make the work of this person difficult. This is highly disadvantageous in case of use for surgeons and the illumination of operating areas, because high quality of a surgical procedure is associated with good illumination.
It was already proposed, in principle, to detect possible obstacles in the direction of the illuminated area by means of proximity sensors and to correspondingly perform a regulation of the light modules. However, the drawback of this prior-art technique is that the proximity sensors have no essential directional characteristic and the position finding of two or more obstacles in the proximity of the light modules may lead to errors. For example, DE 10 2008 019 191 A1 or EP 1 433 998 B1 show possibilities of illumination with shadow compensation. The consequence of this may be both a slight improvement of illumination and incorrect illumination of the illuminated area.